London: Jurors should face up to two years in prison if they search the Internet for information about cases beyond what is revealed in court, the Law Commission has recommended.
Judges should also be given powers to remove jurors’ mobile phones, and all Internet-enabled devices must be confiscated during jury room deliberations, according to the commission’s proposals for reforming contempt of court regulations.
The Attorney General, the report suggests, ought to take on responsibility for ordering the media to remove previously published stories from websites if they are deemed to jeopardise a fair trial. The imposition of strict criminal liabilities on jurors, the Law Commission argues, has become necessary owing to the advent of the Internet and the immediate availability online of information published and stored on sites across the world.
Launching the report, Professor David Ormerod QC, the commissioner leading the review, explained that he was trying to balance defendants’ right to a fair trial, the interests of jurors and public confidence in the administration of justice.
The Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, who has been active in enforcing contempt proceedings, had asked for the work to be expedited. The legal initiative will require the support of a government department to transform the proposals into a draft bill for parliament.
Many of the powers already exist within contempt of court procedures. Ormerod said: “Putting this prohibition on a statutory setting would bring greater clarity and certainty for both courts and juries.
“Members of the jury would know the rules, the wrongdoing could be prosecuted in the same way as other crimes and jurors accused of contempt would benefit from the normal protections of the criminal process.”
There have been a series of recent incidents involving jurors who carried out online research about the case they were trying and then informed the other jurors. In July, a juror who told colleagues at Kingston crown court details about a fraud trial that had not been revealed in court was sentenced to two months in jail; the case collapsed and a new trial had to be held.
Internet-enabled devices should not be automatically taken away from jurors when they enter a court building, the Law Commission proposes, but they should be removed during the period when the jury is deliberating at the end of a trial.
The Guardian
